~ Diving headlong into the adult world, apparently…

A lot on my plate

I have officially become so stressed that I have actually lost my voice. I could, of course, just have laryngitis but the stress is the more likely cause. This is all because I am a ridiculous person who thought it would be OK to take on running a feminist society, standing in a student union election and doing second semester of third year all at the same time. I’m sure that if only I were a little more organised this would be fine, but as those who know me or follow me on twitter know: organisation is not my strong point.

So, running a feminist society. I really enjoy this, we meet up in a pub on a Wednesday evening and collectively rant about topics relating to patriarchy, body hair and lad culture. Currently I do an awful lot of the organising, I guess this comes with the whole “president” territory, but there are things I’m not good at. Like making posters. Currently we’re a very small group due to my lack of advertising but I just don’t really want to put something on a wall that looks rubbish. However, with a film night coming up at the end of the month I’m going to at least have a stab and hopefully this should bring more people in. Some of the best conversations I’ve had at uni have been during femsoc meetings, it’s nice to know I’m not alone in my views!

Standing for election. I’m really not sure when I decided to do this, I can only guess I’d been at the cider and it was quite late at night, which is usually where my best (and worst) decisions are made. But yes, as of 26th February I will be in the running to be VP Campus and Communications, how incredibly scary. I’m spending far too much of my time worrying about whether I’ll get support, how my poster is going to look, whether I’ll persuade anyone to vote for me. My manifesto is written, I have a pretty terrible gimmicky slogan and campaign theme so I’m a bit further than I was last week. Crunch time will be voting week, the plan is just to talk to as many people as possible, what an excellent lesson in overcoming social awkwardness… I’m extremely grateful to be running with my friend Jack, I know I wouldn’t like to be doing this completely on my own! I shouldn’t really be worrying about all this as much as I am but if I don’t get in then I will have a lot of catching up to do in applying for jobs. I’ve got this new philosophy of “if you want something done, do it yourself”, which is the main reason I’m running really as I don’t really have much faith in the people who usually stand for election to make any real change. Still, it’s all really scary stuff.

And so too is being in my last ever semester of uni, it dawned on me the other day that by the end of this semester I will have to have written 20,000 words, and once I’ve done this and taken my 2 final exams there’s a high chance I’m going to be thrown kicking and screaming into the very real world of unemployment. So yeah, no pressure. My first semester results are better than I could ever have hoped for before I started giving a monkeys about my work (ie. up until this time last year) so that is at least a start. I’ve hardly done anything on my dissertation thus far and I’m too scared to see my dissertation tutor because of this. This is probably the thing that is stressing me out the most actually as I just can’t seem to make myself do it. Hopefully I’ll get “the fear” soon!

So at the moment, my metaphorical plate has been loaded with one too many things from the all you can eat buffet that is life and I’m very busy! I thrive off busyness but this also means I end up neglecting things like keeping my room tidy and doing my washing. Really I hope no-one ever expects me to take on the role of “housewife” because they’ll be extremely disappointed!

This has turned into another one of those “me me me” blog posts, I apologise for that. But every time I go to write on a political topic I read a blog post that sums it all up far better than I should. I shall just say though: Workfare is terrible, working for free to benefit a big company is to benefit very few people. Lots of slavery in capitalism, just never realised it was on my doorstep.